Author: brainard

Each thing you do to get your work out there is another step to build your sense of worth about who you are and what you have to offer. Another way to look at the issue of confidence is to begin by faking it. We have all been to interviews or situations where we were being evaluated, and rather than have the sense of self necessary to master the situation, we can get through it by acting as though we are calm and collected, even when we aren’t. When you are asked in a job interview if you can handle the job and if you have doubts about your abilities, what are you going to say? It is the same with your artwork, only the situation is a bit more tricky because you made the work yourself and have a very personal relationship to it. Therefore your approach has to be careful and planned.

Sometimes it is nice to see what it feels like on the other side for just a moment, so here is one exercise I like to do. Wherever you are, dress conservatively and go to a gallery that is the largest you know and preferably the most intimidating. Once you are at the gallery, look around at the artwork there and ask to speak to someone about it. Either a gallery employee or the owner will come out. They have no idea how much money you have, so ask the person approaching you to tell you more about the piece of art you are looking at. What you will hear and see is the selling of an artwork. And since you are perceived as a possible collector, they will do their best to sell you the work. The advantage to this is twofold. On one hand, you get to be the person in power, the collector, and on the other, you can watch as the gallery owner tries to sell your work.

The insight that you can gain here from listening is how they describe the art and what they do to try and sell the work. Pay careful attention because this is how the gallery owner likes to hear about work. You will learn how to describe and talk about art in terms of its value. Be sure to ask questions, such as, “Has the artist sold many of the works in this show?” or, “Why is the work valued at that price?” This can be fun and very educational. It could even start a new career for you as an art buyer for collectors.

However, for the purpose of this chapter, it is also about building confidence and getting out into the world of galleries without having to feel as though you are ready for it.

The role of confidence in your art-making is one of the corner- stones of being a professional. If you can’t find a way to become confident about what you do, it will translate that way to the buying public. The first step to take, or acknowledge, is that you have something to say, a desire to share your work with the world. After asking yourself this question, “Do I have something worth sharing?” think carefully about your answer. Perhaps you are not sure, or maybe you do think you might have something worth sharing. Take your time with this question, because if you look over all the reasons you have to be an artist, one of them is surely that you have something to offer the world that is yours alone.

Often when I am working with artists as a mentor, this is the biggest issue. Confidence is often something that is built up slowly, and deliberately. One woman I worked with didn’t show her work in almost ten years, and she was in her fifties, trying to sell work again. To build her confidence, she began applying to juried shows that you will see on lists like artdeadlines.com. They are not too difficult to get into and often cost you money, and may not be the best shows, but they build confidence because you will be accepted into many of them.

Then she went to the local council on the arts and found out about other shows in her area that were juried and began applying to all of them. Soon she got into a local show, not at a gallery, but a center for the arts or a library. It may not seem like a big show, but it built her confidence, and she was able to move on. One of the most important issues is how you communicate what it is you do and what kind of work you do. It is this that builds confidence, if you can answer that quickly and with a sense of enthusiasm.

There is an artist called The Me Nobody Knows or TMNK who sells his painting on the streets of the city and also on the Internet. He is always near his paintings and has made his living by selling work that is generally under $500, but sometimes more. He is also actively selling his work on eBay, and there, he shows images of himself selling work on the street, and the fact that he is auctioning his own work on eBay makes sense in this context. He is an outsider, generating his own sales on his own terms, and we buy it because it is working and he is a professional. What makes him professional is his consistency. He continues to exhibit his work, and has built a website that promotes his paintings and prints and drives people to eBay. The mystique that he cultivates is that he is a nobody and makes his art in relative obscurity. Of course, he has become just the opposite, but by building that mystique—of a nobody—he is able to play the card of the artist cliché and lead others to believe that he labors in obscurity, which helps to sell his work to the public.

Another example is Abbey Ryan, an artist who sells a painting a day on eBay and earns almost $100,000 a year from it. She has a blog, a website, and has created a way to remain in the studio all day and make a living at it. She was written about in business blogger Seth Godin’s book Linchpin as an example of a businesswoman cutting out the middleman and bringing her work straight to market.

We could begin with artists who sell work on the street. This may not be for you, but consider it for a moment. In New York City and many other cities and towns, artists set up small tables on the street and sell their work. The more savvy artists that have been there for a while are selling matted photographs or prints of some kind in the range of $15 or two for $25.

The artists who are selling on the street are able to get a license to do so fairly easily because they are selling their own art, which is allowed in New York and many other cities. Of course, many artists set up with no license at all.

Nevertheless, this is a valid system of making a real business outside the traditional art market. The artists that are doing very well on the street are selling inexpensive matted prints, but also they are usually hiring others to do it for them, thus increasing how much they earn. It is a fairly simple business plan. If matted prints of your work (which means common color copies or some- thing as inexpensive) cost you about $4 each to make, then you could give someone $2 for every print they sell. So if they are making $4 for selling two prints at $25, you are making $17 on each sale without being there. Not too bad, is it? You could also sell matted prints to boutiques or small stores at wholesale for $8 each. You make $4 with every sale. I am outlining this simple business model because to most readers, this may seem like the least attractive way to sell art, but it is also an easy way to see how sales and profits are made. I have seen artists do street sales on many levels, and it is helpful to discuss because it is such an entrepreneurial venture and the model can be adjusted in all types of ways.

The outsider artist has many definitions, but for the purpose of this chapter, I will consider an outsider someone who may or may not have gone to art school but, in general, an artist who feels they are not “inside” the system as in a traditional gallery. But I will also use it to mean any artist that feels “out of the loop” or somehow apart from what they believe most other artists are connected to. The artist I just wrote about, Mr. Brainwash, would be an outsider in these terms.

Outsider artists are usually considered to be folk artists, that is, artists with little information about the history of art and their place in it. So please understand that while there is overlap in these categories, I am referring to artists who feel like they are “outside” the system of the art market and exhibitions, and want a way in.

Most likely you fit into this category; I know I always have. I did go to art school, but from the start, I wanted to work outside the art world system, partially because I had no idea of how to get on the inside of the art world. When I would ask people how to become part of the club of artists working professionally, I got some odd answers. One of the most interesting was from a friend who said, “Brainard, in order to be on the inside, you have to be on the inside.” At first that was annoying to hear, but after a while, something sunk in. I saw myself as always outside of something, and in order to think the opposite, I would have to feel like I was already there, already on the inside. Ironically, one way to do that is to simply recognize that as an outsider artist or one that feels like it, you are exactly the kind of artist that people on the inside of the art world are looking for, something new, something fresh.

But let’s look more at this label with a specific definition, like selling work on the streets. To begin with, it means that you have fewer rules to think about. As an outsider or someone who just feels that way, you can argue to yourself that you are creating work independent of any trends, and because of that, you are not compared to others unless you choose to be. Yet there is even something more freeing about this idea, because as an outsider, you can also create any strategy you like, and since you have no set of rules, it is a wide-open arena.

His story begins with him putting up posters of his artwork, in a graffiti style, all over Los Angeles in 2007. That was the beginning of his marketing, you could say, for his exhibit. In 2008, he rented an abandoned building, the former CBS Studios in Los Angeles, California, and decided to stage his own show there. He worked tirelessly to fill the space, hiring other artists to do much of the work for him. Like Andy Warhol, he made prints as well as paintings and created portraits of numerous famous pop figures. He also created sculptures and installations. He hired other artists to make most of it for him.

He oversaw the entire process, but to make enough work to fill the gigantic building he was in, he needed people to manufacture and create new designs for paintings. He did this entire production by himself; that is, he had no gallery dealer or representative, just employees. It was, as the press called it, a DIY show, a do-it-yourself exhibit. He must have spent a great sum making all this happen, and has said that he asked people to purchase works in advance to finance much of it. He did hire a curator to help him, the same one that produced the Banksy show a few years earlier.

As a promotion, he said he was going to give away two hundred prints to the first two hundred people that came to the opening. That night, an estimated seven thousand people came to his opening. He sold almost a million dollars’ worth of art! And in one bold stroke, the art world knew his name. To this day, the art world continues to dislike him because he did not travel through the usual channels of the art world; he did it in his own way, on his own terms. And in my book, that is just fine because he is prospering off his work, doing what he wants, and like Damien Hirst, he is challenging the so-called rules of the art world.

Since that show, he opened a similar one in New York in an abandoned warehouse. In New York, the show was also mobbed, and he gave away hundreds of posters and sold work as well. This is a wonderful example of how an artist can not only work outside of the gallery system, but can create their own mystique, marketing, and sales on their own. Is his art good, and is he talented? In this case, as with the others, that is not the issue for me to decide. Because if he is talented or not, he is making it in the art world in a big way. Selling work at major auctions is the ultimate goal of being recognized in the art market. When we examine an artist like this, for the purposes of this book, we are not determining if this is good or bad art; we are looking at his techniques for earning a living and becoming well-known in the world of art.

Part of his initial success was due to his having mounted a show that was so large (over 125,000 square feet) and also to his status as an unknown artist. When you do something on a scale that is record-breaking, the press pays attention. It is a technique used by many promoters and was one of the elements brought into play for this show. He also asked for the help of other people who had organized events in the past. Besides being a driven, obsessive artist, he was also getting all the help he needed. The movie that I previously mentioned, Exit Through the Gift Shop, is a must-see for readers of this book. You will see more details of his story and will probably find it quite inspiring. As with Banksy and Damien Hirst, Mr. Brainwash took the idea of an independent warehouse show to a new level. He was bold and brave enough to believe in what he was doing, and took it one step further than most by making it on a scale that most never imagine doing.

There are many lessons to take from this artist, but I think the most important is that this is a way of working, a way of making it, that is new to the art world. No one had ever seen an artist rise this high and this fast, especially in this manner, separated from the art institutions that are normally the stepping-stones to success.

This is the story of an artist who has done something extraordinary in the past four years. He began making art in 2008 as a total unknown, and was not represented by a gallery. Two years later, in May 2010, his work had already been sold at auction for over $100,000. The art world loves to hate him, and he gets tossed aside by bloggers and the press on a regular basis. He began his career as a filmmaker, but that is a stretch because he was using a video camera and never actually made a finished film. However, he was making a documentary movie on artists who work in the streets, using stencils, spray paint, and sometimes sculptural elements to place their art illegally all over cities. They were graffiti artists in essence, but he ended up profiling some very important figures in that scene, such as Shepard Fairey and Banksy.

On artnet, a website that tracks auction results, this is the information they have on Mr. Brainwash for a biography and career history:

That is all they have for him. And in December 2010, he was in Miami for the prestigious Art Basel Fair and rented a large warehouse space to have another huge self-created solo show in an abandoned warehouse.

His work could be called performance art. It looks and feels like performance art when you see it, and it certainly isn’t a painting or sculpture. It is necessary to have live performers whenever his work is shown. He is the first artist in the performance art world to make significant sums of money from his work; in fact, he is the only one of the performance artists to make money from his work. There were many other quite famous performance artists who were jealous of his success and frustrated by it, because they never found a way to market their own work.

The key to what Tino Sehgal did was to address the issue of collecting his art directly, because your art cannot be in the marketplace if it is not collected. Let’s take this situation apart for a moment, because as poetic as some of Sehgal’s work is, how the system of the art world consumes it is very important.

The people who buy art for personal collections and for investment are not only wealthy, but they speak the language of business all the time. Since they probably accumulated their wealth through hedge funds, private banking, stocks, etc., they are very familiar with the language of money, and in fact, it is their passion. So when a dealer and an artist explain to a potential wealthy collector that upon buying the work, there is no written set of instructions, no written receipt, no catalogue, and no pictures, it begs the very interesting question of “Then how do I buy it and show it in my home?” At that point, they are already engaged. Brilliant! They have never heard of a sale like this before, and they want to know more. What they end up finding out is that the artist tells them verbally what to do, and they have to stage the performance themselves with actors in their home. Because this is such an unusual way to buy work, it generates interest in people who collect and are fascinated by the language of money themselves. Museums can buy and loan the work; it can also be resold, and that is what makes it part of the market. It is also what makes it unlike anything a collector has heard about before.

Sol LeWitt also had a process similar to this. He would sell instructions to make a drawing or mural on a wall. The collector bought the instructions and could have Sol LeWitt’s team of painters execute the drawing on the wall of their choice. The artwork could also be moved by erasing or destroying the wall mural and making it again in another place. Furthermore, LeWitt’s work could be loaned to museums in the same manner. Tino Sehgal is taking a page from LeWitt’s book here by making a sale in a manner that is itself not only creative but very savvy, because the collector is engaged largely in a conversation about how the work itself is purchased, and that is an interesting conversation for collectors. Also, the public and the art world became amazed that he rose so quickly to such heights but also that he was selling his work, which to most people seemed like performance art, and previously no one had sold work in that genre for so much or in such a fashion. As of the writing of this book, in January 2011, Tino Sehgal has not sold any of his art at auctions, but he has sold work to museums and collectors.

Tino Sehgal is a high-profile artist who recently had a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum. I want to talk about him because he has approached the sale of works in a way that in itself is quite new to the art world and, I believe, is one of the reasons for his success. It is also something you can adopt or use to stoke your own creative approach no matter what level you are currently at in your career.

Tino Sehgal creates what he calls “constructed situations” in which one or more people are performing instructions created by the artist. That means, much like a theatre director, he tells a group of people that he hires to have conversations based on a theme of some kind. In the show at the Guggenheim, you never see the artist, there is no art on the walls, and when you walk in, a small child asks you what you think the word “progress” means. You begin to have a conversation with that person and then you are led to another person who continues the conversation until you reach the end of the ramp at the museum. What the artist has done is train all the actors, so to speak, to ask certain questions to the audience members.

The reason I am using this artist as an example of a new method for selling your work is this: on the sale of his work, he stipulates that there is no written set of instructions, no written receipt, no catalogue, and no pictures. That’s right, he sells his work so that you could, in fact, buy one of these pieces, but there is nothing physical to own, not even a receipt. During the show, there was another piece of his, which was a couple kissing endlessly on the floor of the museum. The two people kissing would do so for two hours at a time, and then the actors were changed. The remarkable thing to me is that the kissing couple piece was owned by MoMA and lent to the Guggenheim for this show! So what I want to examine here is how he sold the work and why it is significant and also important to your process.

The lesson and perhaps inspiration to take from Banksy is that he is playing by his own rules. Like other graffiti artists, he paints on the street, but unlike other artists, he has consciously created his own mystique. By remaining anonymous, he continues to engage the public in a guessing game. Also, his content is often touching on issues of social and political injustice, and this is something that many people can respond to. Rather than have images that are decorative, his work is engaging the viewer and asking them to use their minds and agree with him or not. That is a provocative idea that brings the viewer into his fold.

The latest effort in marketing himself was quite brilliant. In his 2010 film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, which I strongly recommend seeing, he cleverly uses another filmmaker’s footage of him and other street artists to document the whole genre of street-art painting. But he also skewers the art world by presenting an artist that had never had a show before, who calls himself Mr. Brainwash, and is a total unknown. Like Banksy and Hirst, he had a warehouse-type opening that was a success. He is profiled later in this chapter.

The method of Banksy and other artists who mount their own shows in abandoned warehouses is becoming more popular, and it is one of the new methods that you should consider. You can remake the idea in any way you wish, but in this economy, there are more empty spaces than ever, and it is worth considering. You don’t have to mount a giant solo show; a group show in an empty commercial space can work even better because all the artists will have their own mailing list, and it can generate even more traffic that way.